Asteroid 319 Leona to Occult Betelgeuse on Mon. December 11th

[Sureshks]

Hi all,

The bright orange star Betelgeuse in Orion will be occulted on the evening of Monday Dec. 11th by the small asteroid 319 Leona.

The occultation path is very narrow, and passes thru southern Europe and South Florida. Unfortunately, it does not pass thru Minnesota.

Leona is only about 40-50 miles in diameter, and may be too small to completely cover up the disk of Betelgeuse. Though the star is about 640 light years away, it is enormous, at about 767 million miles in diameter. If it were placed where the Sun is, Betelgeuse would stretch almost all the way out to Saturn. Because of it's immense size, parts of the star may still be visible thru a telescope during the estimated 7-second occultation.

Betelgeuse has been in the news a few times over the past several years. Some astronomers believe that the star has nearly exhausted it's supply of nuclear fuel, and is about to go supernova. A revised estimate now suggests it could happen sometime in the next 1,000-100,000 Earth years... which is just a wink in the scheme of the universe.

Then, starting in late-2019, Betelgeuse dimmed noticeably in the night sky. And it remained that way into March 2019, when it brightened back to normal again. Some astronomers thought this was a sign of an impending supernova explosion. But ultimately they concluded that the gigantic star had belched out a huge amount of material, which then masked part of the star for several months before dissipating.

And now it will be covered up very briefly by a small asteroid. Very cool!!

You can watch the occultation live on Monday night, starting at 7:00pm CT, by using this link provided by the Virtual Telescope Project:

https://www.virtualtelescope.eu/2023/12 ... -dec-2023/

For more information on this occultation, see here:

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news ... roid-leona

Suresh

[wmaalouli]

Here's the best YT video showing the occultation: https://www.youtube.com/live/ik746bduNA ... HRhB97vYLv
Not as dramatic as one expected, but still quite obvious.

[Sureshks]

Thanks for sharing. It looks like right after the 34:30 mark there was a significant dip in brightness for about 3 seconds. Maybe 75% at most. But certainly not all of Betelgeuse's light was blocked. And then a rapid rebrightening.

This matches other observations I have read from Spain and Portugal. They reported a 2-3 second dip and then a rapid rebrightening. That's very different from the estimates of 7 seconds that were posted prior to the event.

It seems that either Leona is smaller than predicted, Betelgeuse's apparent disk is larger, or that Leona's tumbling nature caused more of Betelgeuse's light to get through than expected. It might be that all 3 are true.

It'll be interesting to read the astronomers' conclusions.

Suresh

[wmaalouli]

I still amazes me that this event was even predicted at all... Too bad we were out of the line of sight as it would have been an easy target for most telescopes.